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Salary: USD 190,000 - 250,000 / annual
Skydio is the leading US autonomous drone company, serving defense, public safety, and enterprise customers. The Edge Experience team owns the full pilot experience on Skydio's controllers—from radio link and video streaming through to the product interfaces operators rely on in the field.
You will design and build intuitive, high-performance operator interfaces for real-time drone control, video streaming, and mission management. Working at the intersection of Skydio's autonomous flight engine, cloud services, and physical controller hardware, you'll shape how people interact with the world's most advanced autonomous drones. This role bridges the command interface from dispatch-to-flight workflows through real-time situational awareness to mission planning.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design intuitive, high-performance operator interfaces for real-time drone control, video streaming, and mission management
- Work cross-functionally with autonomy, firmware, cloud, and product teams to translate complex system capabilities into simple, reliable user experiences
- Architect and build product features that bridge the C++ autonomy engine, Android application layer, and cloud services—owning the full vertical from native libraries through JNI/NDK to the Kotlin UI
- Build and leverage AI-powered agentic workflows to accelerate engineering velocity through automated testing, code generation, and intelligent developer tooling
- Champion the product engineer mindset: deeply understand operator needs, think end-to-end from hardware to cloud, and own outcomes
- Mentor engineers and raise the bar on software quality, system design, and user-centric thinking
The team believes in shipping incrementally, automating the critical path, and measuring what matters. Every feature built touches real hardware, real airspace, and real missions—software must be reliable, performant, and intuitive enough for high-stress, high-stakes operation.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 5+ years professional software engineering experience with Android, including substantial work in Kotlin/Java and some C++
- Deep experience with Android NDK and JNI—you've built and debugged native libraries shipping in production Android apps
- Proficiency in Kotlin and modern Android ecosystem (Coroutines, Jetpack/Architecture Components, Gradle)
- Previous experience with one or more graphics APIs (Vulkan, OpenGL ES, or Metal)
- Strong debugging and profiling skills across native/managed boundary (ASan, Perfetto, Android Studio profilers)
- Experience with low-latency network communication (UDP, WebRTC, or custom protocols)
- Proficiency in Linux development environments
- FAA Part 107 certification required within first 60 days of employment (strongly encouraged for all Skydio employees, required for certain positions)
NICE TO HAVES:
- Shipped mobile apps integrating with IoT devices or robots
- Experience with Bazel build system
- AOSP or Android platform/framework-level experience
- Familiarity with video codecs (H.264/H.265), camera pipelines, or real-time media processing
About Skydio
Defense / GovTech; Industrial — autonomous drones for defense, public safety, and enterprise.
